


Forbidden

by heartinbrooklyn



Series: Voyeur 'Verse [1]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Forbidden foods, Infidelity, Kash-centric, M/M, Muslim religion, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 03:08:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2606204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartinbrooklyn/pseuds/heartinbrooklyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kash develops a taste for the forbidden - and Ian Gallagher is the ultimate forbidden fruit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forbidden

**Author's Note:**

> I like stories where other characters, sometimes minor ones, are looking in at a relationship. Thought I'd do a series of one-shots about people watching Ian and Mickey's relationship as they progress. 
> 
> I'm not a Kash fan, but I wanted to get into his head and see how he felt about Ian.

On the night of Kash Karib’s thirteenth birthday, his father hands him a lukewarm sandwich wrapped in crinkly yellow paper. The McDonalds in Evanston is teeming with people and cars, and as Kash sits in the hard plastic seat surrounded by his parents, four siblings, and a cursory friend invited along for his birthday, he makes a wish over his French friends and hopes that it reaches someone’s ear.

He wishes for Avia 880s like his older brother wears, even though his older brother has a paying job as a dishwasher and Kash has to sweep and stock for free in their parents’ store. It’s not a very exciting wish, but nothing exciting ever happens to Kash.

He’s unwrapping his cheeseburger while kicking his little sister away for daring to reach for his coke instead of her own when he notices something about his dense little ball of burger. The bun isn’t plastered to the cheese to the meat like normal. Kash notices these little things, though nobody else does, so he gently pries the corner of the bun up.

His suspicions are confirmed – some idiot lineworker’s put bacon on his sandwich, either through oversight or deliberate maliciousness towards Kash’s very obviously Muslim family.

Kash looks around the table. Everyone else is already biting into their food, talking with their mouths open and chewing the cheap grease without stopping to panic and pray. Now, Kash’s dad can be pretty oblivious, but his mom can taste that useless pinch of salt in a batch of cookies (or more accurately when Kash has forgotten it), so he’d expect her to throw a fit.

Nothing. The Karibs eat, and Kash contemplates his sandwich with all the gravity of a thirteen year old who’s never really been presented with the opportunity to sin before. Sure, he can disobey his parents and get into scrapes, but that’s normal kid stuff; he’s seen his brothers do it a hundred times.

This is forbidden, though.

He pushes the bun against the bacon to flatten it down, expecting his heart to start pounding any second. It doesn’t.

He takes a chunk out of the burger, almost choking on the hugeness of the bite, and swallows it too quickly. It tastes good, and it tastes salty, but he doesn’t really see what the big deal is.

He eat the rest of the burger slowly, relishing the feeling of the forbidden more than the taste. Even sweeter than the transgression is how coolly he can get away with it, and it’s heady on his tongue.

 

When Kash is sixteen, his sister makes him cover her babysitting gig so she can give her boyfriend a handjob in the last row of the Evanston Cinemark 12. He doesn’t mind; he likes the twin girls that she babysits for, and he pretty much just watches TV with them before dropping them into bed and turning on the singing nightlight.

He goes back downstairs and channel surfs, listening vaguely for sounds of distress from the girls’ room, and he realizes that the parents are late getting home somewhere around the fourth rerun of 90210. The minutes continue to tick by as he calls his own mother and reports, to her ire, that he’ll be late getting home. He’s convinced that he doesn’t deserve her rant about his curfew and his own homework, conveniently incomplete in his bedroom, because it isn’t his fucking fault that the parents or late, or that his sister’s a hoe. Part of him wants to tell his mom just _why_ he’s covering for Vega, but he likes her boyfriend too much to get the both of them in trouble. Gabe’s a cool guy, smooth and suave and confident, and Kash wants Gabe to think he’s cool too.

So he goes exploring for something interesting or juicy, but he doesn’t find any salacious about the Jacksons. Instead, he finds their alcohol cupboard.

He feels a certain type of way as he looks at the fourteen mostly-full bottles (he counts). It’s the same feeling that flared through his senses in an uncomfortable McDonalds booth and made his pulse thrum with the knowledge of his secret. He can’t remember what the bacon tasted like, but he remembers the illicit feeling and how smooth it had gone down.

But he has to be smart about this. Grease covers up the smell of grease, but this is _Vodka_. He picks vodka because of a plot line he’s just seen on 90210, not because he has any idea what he’s actually going to prefer. He probably isn’t going to prefer any of them – they all smell nasty when he uncaps them and wafts their forbidden fumes toward his nose.

He goes to his backpack and takes a plastic water bottle out. He dumps it in the sink and carries it back to the cabinet, where he very carefully fills it up almost halfway from the vodka bottle. It’s just enough that it won’t be missed, and he doesn’t think it will get him drunk and ruin everything.

When the Jacksons finally get home and apologize profusely, Kash smiles and shrugs it off. He goes home, does his algebra homework, and waits for the house to settle and his parents to turn the lights off.

After everyone’s asleep, he creeps into the bathroom and drinks the disgusting liquor in the bathtub, just in case it does make him ill. It tastes like paint thinner mixed with road kill, but it’s not the taste he wants.

No one in his house is the wiser the next morning. That fact burns like an ember in his stomach long after the burn of the alcohol fades away.

 

When Kash is thirty five, he’s checking off cranberry juice inventory on a scuffed brown clipboard when Ian Gallagher walks into his store. The kid is twenty years his junior, bursting with freckles, and still cheerful despite Linda’s crankiest interview questions. His ass fills out his thin denim jeans, and he looks up at Kash from under red bangs and smiles even as Linda threatens to call the cops on him if so much as a dollar goes missing from the register.

“Geez, Lind, he hasn’t even gotten near the register yet,” Kash tells Ian with a macho little laugh. Linda narrows her eyes, scenting something dangerous already, though she has no idea what it is, and Ian laughs back.

“So your name is Kash, like the register?” Ian teases. Conservatively, Kash has heard that one a thousand times, but he laughs like Ian’s new and clever and special.

He is new and clever and special – and his first week on the job just confirms it all the more. Kash tastes bacon and vodka in the back of his throat, but somehow, he doesn’t think Ian Gallagher will be as much of a letdown. He bets that Ian tastes like sex and youth, and Kash has never had anything like that under his tongue. He’s never had anyone but Linda, chosen to piss off his parents while not breaking their hearts beyond repair.

A white woman’s better than a brown man to them, and truth be told, he doesn’t have the balls to seek any men out. He’s never tried to satisfy this craving deep in his gut, even though he knows damn well what it is and just how little Linda can do for it. It’s like he never sought out pork or alcohol before they virtually fell into his hand. A deliberate sinner, he isn’t.

An opportunist, though…how can he ignore what’s put in front of him like this?

He follows Ian around the store for a month, pretending to double-check his work and monitor him during his training period. In truth, he has no idea if Ian’s pocketing donuts or forgetting to face the cans – he’s interested in the little strip of freckled skin that shows at Ian’s waistline when he reaches above his head to put something on a top shelf.

Technically the store has a ladder. Kash tells Linda that some bum must have stolen it.

Kash is kneeling behind the counter to rotate the chewing tobacco inventory when Ian walks up in front of him, crotch at Kash’s eye level

Vodka and bacon.

“Okay, we need to have a talk about how you’re always staring at me,” Ian says with far more bravado than he has in Kash’s daydreams where he’s begging and whimpering on Kash’s cock.

“Uh, what?” Kash says. He also sounds a little different in his own fantasies.

Then Ian throws a foot over Kash’s folded legs and sits down on his lap as much as he can at the forced angle. Kash’s hand flutter at Ian’s hips, hardly daring to grasp.

The Ian kisses him, inexperience clinging to his lips, and it’s the headiest thing Kash has ever tasted.

Kash breaks the kiss to peer over the peeling counter top. He gently pushes Ian off his lap and runs with an obvious bulge in his pants to lock the front door, and then he rounds the counter.

Ian’s sprawled on the greying tile, hoodie spread behind him like wings, his fingers pulling down his zipper.

Linda doesn’t know. No one knows but him and Ian. And yes, Ian is just as mouth-watering as imagined.

 

The difference between Ian and the forbidden fruits that have come before him is the longevity of the time Kash can keep him. Ian shows up four days a week with his crisp apron. He grins at Linda, actually puts things on the shelves in their rightful places, and takes the time to count out exact change for each and every customer. Ian has to know that he could show up, drink soda pop, and read porn magazines without any reprimanding when Kash is in charge of the store, but he still does his job.

And a little extra.

The first few months, Ian doesn’t let Kash fuck him. They keep it to handjob and blowjobs in quick, ten-minute intervals when the door is locked and Linda is definitely occupied upstairs, but of course Kash tries a few times. He’s got Ian bent over a shelf of pretzels, and his fingers are slick with actual lube, but Ian bucks him off.

“No,” he tells Kash, still flashing those dimples that make Kash’s teeth hurt with their innocence.

“Come on, baby,” Kash tries to cajole. Ian bats away his hand again and actually moves to pull his jeans over his perfect ass.

“I’m a top,” Ian says with the confidence of an older, more experienced man. Kash doesn’t like that; he can’t summon that much confidence on his best days.

And how the fuck would Ian know if he’s a top?

The months melt away, though, and Kash gets desperate. He runs through the ways to come on or against or inside Ian, and the sparkle in his brain gets a little fuzzy. The specialness of Ian is becoming routine, and he threatens to turn into another bitter aftertaste.

So Kash rethinks and lets Ian fuck him, gasping like a fish on land as Ian pounds into him in the alley behind the store. It feels amazing, so much more so than Kash was expecting, and the spark flares up again. Kash literally can’t think of anything more illicit than this – the cheating, Ian’s maleness, the ages…it’s almost too far, but he’s been stuck in a dull, colorless life for so long that it’s just enough to reignite his world with interest and excitement.

He becomes a better, more attentive husband and father. Though Linda doesn’t believe it, he becomes a better business owner. Ian makes him better all-around because Ian makes him give a shit in a way that he really hasn’t since he looked around as a child and realized that a loveless marriage and a failing convenience store were his destiny.

But the problem of trying to keep Ian’s spark is that Ian’s destiny, whatever it is, is much bigger than the shelves and scuffed tiles of the store. He’s a teenage boy like Kash once was, and what was so off limits and therefore desirable to Kash have been at Ian’s fingertips since he could walk. He eats anything he can get his growing, freckled hands on without any thought to unclean foods, and he drinks with the casualness that only the child of an alcoholic can possess.

Kash’s pleasures aren’t Ian’s pleasures – they’re so far removed that Kash can’t begin to imagine how Ian will tempt the forbidden, as all adolescents are wont to do.

Then Kash catches Ian with Mickey Milkovich, neighborhood thug and Southside renowned fag-basher, and he thinks he’s found Ian’s poison.


End file.
